From 4am baths to 15 appointments a day, Alexander Phillips reveals the methods behind his nine years at the top of Australia’s real estate game.
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Alexander Phillips was born on the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, late for an appointment at the maternity ward. Aiming for his tenth year in a row as Australia’s number-one real estate sales person, he knows that punctuality is key.
Phillips had 37 open houses on the weekend he spoke to Forbes Australia. He made sure he got to them all. “My schedule is like a jigsaw puzzle. But I make sure I’m present. I’m not on my phone. I talk to buyers. The vendors see me – and that’s at every price point.”
Last year, Phillips and his seven assistants claimed sales of 205 properties in Sydney’s east worth a total of $973 million, down from his 2021 high of $1.1 billion from 254 homes. Phillips was said to be the first individual agent in Australia to crack the magic billion. He’s held the mantle of Australia’s top-selling agent for nine years in a row, as judged by industry website Real Estate Business.
As former colleague and now competitor Shannan Whitney of BresicWhitney says, “To master the sort of work that we do at the level that he has, it’s quite extraordinary.”
Through all that, Phillips works hard to stay grounded. “Today I lifted a garden pot in a house because it was in the wrong spot,” he says, on time for our appointment in his Woollahra office boardroom. “I still put A-frame boards out on the corner of the streets. I still talk to people at open houses.”
Completing that scheduling jigsaw puzzle daily requires a rigidity of mind and diary.
Phillips’ day starts at 4 am when he takes a hot bath. “I manifest what I’m doing that day, who I’m meeting, what I need to get out of each day,” he says.
Out of the bath, he goes for a run or has a personal training session until 5.25 am when he cooks breakfast – scrambled eggs, bacon, and a plunger coffee – before going for coffee in inner-city Darlinghurst. There, he confirms the day’s appointments.
“I get into the office at 6.45 am and write notes for all my meetings that day – so every single meeting I go into, I’m across any scenario that might get thrown at me, and I’m preparing for what we want to get out of it.”
He starts making calls at 7:20 am, catching anything he might have missed the day before, vendors, buyers.
Appointments begin at 9 am. Most days, he’s got 10 to 15. “House appraisals take 45 minutes. I always do them on the hour, so you go 10 am, 11 am, 12 pm, 1 pm, 2 pm. I’ve got my lunch in my car. My wife [Brighid] kindly makes it the night before [ham and salad roll or, say, steak and rice], so I’ve always got enough energy.”
Phillips never takes his phone to an appointment. He needs to be fully present. When he gets back in his Porsche 911, he’s busy returning all the missed calls while he drives to the next meeting. He tries to be home by 5:30 pm and in bed by 9:30 pm.
He works seven days a week. “I always say don’t feel sorry for me working on a Sunday; I’m going to have a good holiday soon.” Indeed, he takes 10 to 12 weeks off each year – five to six weeks in the middle of the year, four to five over Christmas, and a week in the middle of each block. When he’s away, his phone is diverted. “I get very well rested. It’s probably why I’m still where I am today.”
Learning by osmosis
Phillips traces his sales roots to his father and grandfather, who owned Sports Car World on Parramatta Road, Burwood, in Sydney’s Inner West. “I was born on William Street, on the way to St. Margaret’s, I think, on the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, my dad likes to tell everyone.”
He grew up in a waterfront house at Woolwich, on Sydney Harbour, but the family moved to a 2,000-hectare grazing property near Wellington in NSW’s Central West when Phillips was young, while his father sold earthmoving equipment.
He’d always remember his father saying, “Mr. Will-Be-Back will never be back. You got to close them on the spot.”
He’d see his father pick up customers at the airport. “If I’m picking them up from the airport, I’m going to close them out.” And he’d remember long drives to the Gold Coast with his father on the phone selling. “As a young kid, you listen to those conversations; it just gets into your blood.”
At school, Phillips toyed with the idea of going into hospitality, but a little work experience cured him of that notion. Not much of a reader or student, an aptitude test predicted he’d be good at sales, so when he was in Year 12, he started interning for Burridge First National real estate in Drummoyne.
He did a one-year certificate, saw that the hottest new agent in town was John McGrath, and so, in 2000, got a job there as an assistant. “I did three months with a lady called Bethwyn Richards. If I were one minute late, she’d call me at one past and say, ‘Where are you?’ So that didn’t work out.” But he learnt the lesson. “Bethwyn taught me. I’m never late for an appointment. It’s showing you don’t care if you’re late. We plan our day meticulously so there are no mistakes.”
At McGrath Estate Agents, he became the assistant to agent Pauline Goodyer. “It was like a boiler room in that office. It was all phone-call driven – you’d just hear the vibe of 20 agents making hundreds of calls a day, the dialogue they have, it was a great energy.”
“You’re tempting them and getting them all frothy for the property.”
Alexander Phillips
He’s not a book person. But when he was driving between jobs, he’d have sales CDs playing on the stereo. “You get taught as a young real estate agent that you make a hundred phone calls and book two appraisals. It was very much a numbers game. What we got really good at is how you talk to someone on the phone, how you interact with them, or how you progress them. A lot of salespeople are robotic because they get a script, and they use that across everybody.”
He’d been an assistant for about ten years when he became an agent with Goodyer Donnelley prior to when that partnership dissolved, and he went into business with his former boss, Debbie Donnelley and Jason Pantzer, to form Phillips Pantzer Donnelley.
Early on, they had a house for sale in Bronte. “We knew it was going to be a big auction. We did a huge marketing campaign, letterbox drops. We got the front cover of Domain. I ordered 500 copies, wrapped them and handed them out to everybody in Bronte with a little note from me.
“At the auction, a dog had done a poo out the front. I walked dog shit through the whole house, up and down the stairs. It was everywhere and probably gave the property good luck. We ended up selling it for $1.1 million above reserve. The next weekend, we did another one in Waverley for about 800 grand above reserve. We used these to build our brand and expertise in the area.”
Most years, he’s averaged just 15 days on market per property, though that has lengthened with the softer market of recent years. How does he do that?
“Most agents wait for the property to go on the market and for a buyer to come. What I learned very early on through John McGrath, Ivan Bresic [who founded BresicWhitney in 2003], and other people was to have good buyers and know what they’re looking for. So, if your house goes on the market next week, that’s an official day on the market. But I’m already making phone calls to my buyers. ‘I’ve got a great house for you. We’ll show you through the day it goes on the market.’
“Each property we put on the market, we should already know the buyer or, if not, be able to bring in a good pool of buyers – they missed out on another property, or they’re pregnant, they’ve got urgency.”
Phillips says it’s rarely about needing to soften vendor expectations. “Because, if you’re selling quickly, you’re selling beyond expectations. And the reason why they’ve sold so quickly is we brought competition from day one to that property. Most agents take two weeks. We’ve got competition on them on the first day.
“We call it an IPO [initial public offering] period. So, if your property goes on the market next week, we want 10 to 20 buyers looking at it on day one. You’re tempting them and getting them all frothy for the property. If I’m not getting a record price and they’re not telling the whole street, I won’t get the next sale.”
His all-time favourite sale was 3 Silva Street, Tamarama, for Bank of America’s Peter Phillips and his wife Susannah. “[PointsBet co-founder] Nick Fahey bought it. The Lowy family were the underbidders. It was in the middle of COVID-19. The reserve price was 13 [million dollars], and it went for 16. It was a negotiation between two very heavy business people who wanted to take charge, but we were able to say, ‘No, we’re doing it our way, we’re taking full control and here’s why.’ It was the talk of the town for a long time.”Phillips lives on “the dry side” of one of Sydney’s most expensive streets, in waterfront Vaucluse. He owns nine investment properties and says 90% of his money is tied up in real estate.
So, how much does Phillips make from all this?
“Well, I think you could do the sums yourself. I sell a billion dollars of real estate a year. Our average fee is between 1.6% and 1.8%. It’s a lucrative business, but it’s hard work and a grind.” To save you getting the calculator out, 1.7% of $1 billion is $17 million, but his seven assistants also get a cut. “They’re very well paid too,” says Phillips.
